[3.5] Monster Level Adjustment

[Cardea]

When looking at a Monster Entry, occasionally I won't see a Level Adjustment.

How would extrapolate a Level Adjustment from such a creature? Spellweaver, specifically.

[Kuulvheysoon]

If there is no level adjustment listed, it means that they are not suitable for Player Characters.

[Deca4531]

you might be able to find more info on this in the Savage Species book. its 3.0 but it converts over just fine, and its whole bases is monsters as a playable race. there is also a "build a custom PC race" section in one of the PF books.

[bekeleven]

The shortest answer is: Level adjustment of null means the race is not intended to be played by a player.

For the spell weaver in particular, who has 10 monstrous humanoid HD and a CR of 10, by those stats would have an LA of +2 to +5.

However this neglects the fact that the spell weaver is poorly balanced, AND is assumed to be treasureless and not optimized. Optimizing gear and arm number ups his abilities significantly. The thing has 12th level racial casting, right? That alone brings its LA to +2 on top of 10 HD. It needs another +1 or +2 for gear, and +2 to +4 for spell weaving. The disk is hilarious but probably isn't worth +1 by itself, although it is abusable.

[Urpriest]

Yeah, the reason Spellweaver doesn't have an LA is because you're not supposed to play it since it's potentially something of an ubercaster.

In general you can use the guidelines in Savage Species, but usually it's best to rebalance monsters in some way if you want to play ones without listed LA.

[GreenSerpent]

Spellweaver was given a +7 LA in the 3.5 MM2 update, I believe.

[Chronos]

If it's a 3.0 book, there's probably an update to it to make it compatible with 3.5, and one of the things that update will do is list LAs for any monsters in the book.